Why does PureOS exist?
The way I see it is that your added value is in providing hardware and platform support (a Linux kernel concept).
I have absolutely no interest for example in running a Debian derived system, because of the work involved in keeping my system up to date. In particular upgrades between major versions generally do not work.
I fully expect that if the Purism laptops ever become popular that a similar thing could happen. Offering a supported OS is a huge support cost and I think you shouldn’t offer that service.
Pop!_OS from System76 is a similar mistake. Even if it would work perfectly (which it can’t), it would still be a slightly different operating system from our production environment. I can imagine that many developers would opt for a native operating system closest to whatever is running on their servers.
I can sort of see the need to ship something, but a rebranding seems to be the wrong strategy.
I would like to see you commit to making all your patches available for easy, automated integration into other Linux (and possibly others) distributions with all the platform support in the Linux kernel upstream.
When I look in the Linux kernel and search for librem or purism, I don’t see anything returned, which seems to suggest you do not have special support available, like there is for example when you compare to one of the best supported devices for Linux that has ever existed (the thinkpad).
See these links to verify:
https://livegrep.com/search/linux?q=librem&fold_case=auto®ex=false&context=true
https://livegrep.com/search/linux?q=purism&fold_case=auto®ex=false&context=true
VS
https://livegrep.com/search/linux?q=thinkpad&fold_case=auto®ex=false&context=true
The laptops I use are more expensive than the ones you are offering, so it’s not a money issue. You are doing a lot of things right, but I also wonder a bit about your lack of focus in that you are also trying to develop a phone now. You have 14 employees, not 150.
I hope you appreciate my feedback and focus your development efforts on making differentiating hardware features while supplying generic support for Linux and get rid of PureOS as much as you can.